Being entertained and going social: The Ultimate Smartphone Guide, part II

Hunting down the best apps for reading comics, finding a restaurant, and more.

In part one of our Ultimate Smartphone Guide series, we told you which handsets were best for which users. Now in part two, we're going to walk through the entertainment app landscape for each ecosystem, discussing how best to connect with friends and watch content on Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8.

Smartphones are just as commonplace as our wallet and keys these days—we can't leave the house without them and we certainly freak out if they go missing. Our phones are packed with powerful CPUs and GPUs; the Snapdragon SOC with its Adreno GPU is the most powerful combo the Android and Windows Phone 8 platforms have seen, and Apple's extra-speedy A6 improves on the already-quick A5 it replaces. Whichever platform we're on, we use that power to document our daily happenings, to check in to see how our friends are family are doing, to communicate verbally and textually, and even to read a book before bed. We use our phones to order food or make reservations, tag ourselves with others while out having a good time, and catch up on our favorite television shows on the long train ride home.

So in our second installment of the Ultimate Smartphone Guide, we've rounded up some of the best apps for doing all of these things. This guide should save you from scrolling endlessly through all the different app stores, looking for the right app to do that one thing. One note going in: we're focusing on picking out apps—we're not looking at the app stores themselves and what the app discovery and purchase process is like.

Also, there's one important category you won't see below: apps for listening to or making music. Music is incredibly important—so important, in fact, that we're giving it its own separate feature next week. Don't worry, music lovers, you won't be left behind.

As with our first feature in the series, we're focusing on iPhones, Android phones, and Windows Phone 8 phones. BlackBerry fans will have to sit this series out—RIM is poised to launch all new handsets and a new operating system early next year, and we'll wait on them until then. But if you're using an iPhone, Android device, or Windows Phone 8 handset, take a gander at our picks for the best entertainment apps and see if there's something you've been missing out on.

The best apps for reading anything

E-books

Unless you're already heavily invested in either the iBookstore or Google Play, Amazon's Kindle app (free for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) is the best e-book app on the market. Not only does it grant you access to Amazon's gigantic library of e-books, graphic novels, comics, and children's books, but it's cross platform. Your digital books are available on any device that supports the service, including Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8, any Kindle device, and your computer. The Kindle app also offers the best, clearest reading experience on all three platforms (calculated on a scale of "does this make my head hurt after five minutes?" to "I could read this all night"), the biggest library, and it even doubles as a PDF reader. Actually, any PDF you upload is stored in the cloud, so you can keep it tied to your Amazon account and refer to it later. The only caveat is that PDFs don't automatically adjust themselves for your smartphone's screen size.

Enlarge/ The Kindle application for Android displays all of your purchased and downloaded literature in one handy column.

Magazines

Amazon offers a number of magazine titles in its Kindle store, but depending on the publisher you're loyal to, you may not find what you need. However, there are other apps like Zinio (free for iOS and Android). Zinio will deliver magazines to your smartphone the minute they're available, and you can subscribe right from within the application. There's also a Zinio Reader for your computer should you want to take those pages to the big screen. But if you'd rather not invest in an entirely new service, you can also stick to Apple's iBookstore and Google Play magazines.

Enlarge/ Apps like Zinio display digital versions of your favorite magazines on your iPhone, though you can double tap to get a closer look.

Windows Phone 8 users, unfortunately, must stick to Amazon's Kindle app. There are currently no major third-party or native digital magazine subscriptions services for the platform available beyond that.

Comic books and graphic novels

You can't always trot down to your local comic book shop to pick up your favorite titles, and luckily, there are apps for that. If you're just up for reading and archiving digital comics, Comics by ComiXology (free for iOS and Android) should be downloaded immediately. The app was one of the first to feature digital comics in the iTunes App Store, and now it's majorly expanded to include titles from major comic book publishers like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics, BOOM studio, Red 5, TOKYOPOP, eigoMANGA, Top Cow, and more. ComiXology also features deals, sales, and over 500 free comics.

Enlarge/ Comics look fantastic on the iPhone, even with its relatively minuscule display size. Just like Zinio, all you have to do here is double tap to read.

Comics by ComiXology sets itself aside from competitors by displaying comics in a unique fashion. Rather than just simply displaying each page on the screen, you can swipe from panel to panel. Some comics even feature backdrops and graphics that animate, which is a neat touch on an otherwise very static medium. The app takes advantage of the A5 or A6 CPU in iOS devices or the Snapdragon SOC in Android devices and its zooming and animation effects are smooth and seamless. This feature also makes it easier to distinguish what's going on in the storyline on a smaller screen without having to zoom in too much.

In the Windows Phone Marketplace, DC Comics(Free) also uses the ComiXology platform to make its titles available to Windows Phone users. You can log in with your ComiXology username, but if you're mostly tuned into Marvel's cast of characters, you won't have access to any of previously purchased comics yet.

Enlarge/ The DC Comics app in the Windows Marketplace shares some of the same characteristics of the ComiXology app on other platforms.

Alternatively, if you've got DRM-free comics or independently distributed issues, you can use apps likeLindy Comics (99 cents) for Windows Phone 8. Lindy allows you to read .crb and .cbz files available in your Dropbox and offers some of the same reading options featured in other mainstream comics. For Android users, Comic Reader Mobi ($14.99) will fix every single comic reading problem you've ever had by using its own Smart Lens technology to automatically detect where the text block is on a file and pop it out to a legible size. It supports file extensions like RAR and Zip, as well as .crb and .cbz files. If you're on an iPhone, check out Comics Reader Pro ($1.99), which also lets you launch comic books from your Dropbox or mobile Safari.

If you'd rather not sift through numerous status updates and your Google Reader to get to all the good stuff, Flipboard (Free for iOS and Android) will curate all of the top stories from your social networking accounts and present them as your own personalized cover page. You can also link seemingly all your accounts—Facebook, Google+, Instragram, YouTube, Twitter, and more. As an added bonus, you can add feeds to your favorite sites so that you only have to check one app a day for all the most important headlines, then easily share what you're reading with all of your social networks. Older phones might notice some UI slowdowns with all the app's fancy effects, but the fast SOCs in all of the recommended devices from part 1 of our guide (Snapdragon on Android/Windows Phone 8 and A6 on the iPhone 5) will run this and other apps smoothly.

If you're not interested in Flipboard's fancy UI, Google Currents (Free for iOS and Android) simplifies the way you receive your news. Rather than list a bunch of headlines from RSS feeds on a page, Currents taps into your Google Reader subscriptions and lays them out in tile format by favicon. This makes it easy to sift through only the sites you feel like reading that day. At the top of the homepage, Google will run through a slide of the five most-viewed articles, based on its own traffic numbers. The app also provides offline reading and one-touch sharing.

Enlarge/ Google Currents features a slide on its homepage that cycles through the day's top stories.

For Windows Phone users, Fuse ($1.29) offers the same type of dynamic reading experience. The app connects to external services like Google Reader and allows you to view them in ribbon form, in a funky typographic format, or as photo tiles. You can also create groups and import them from your Reader preference. You can add external RSS feeds and YouTube channels. If you find something you enjoyed reading, you can also share it to Facebook and Twitter, or via a QR code. If you have a site you love to read on a daily basis, you can also tack it on as a Live Tile.

Enlarge/ Fuse can display your content in three different modes, including this tile view.

55 Reader Comments

I'd like to point out 4th and Mayor as an excellent Foursquare client for Windows Phone. Much better than the client from Foursquare since it takes advantage of things like pinning places and friends to the start screen. Got a couple of my most frequented placed pinned for one-tap access and just over all feels better suited to the platform.

Probably appropriately not mentioned in "essentials", inasmuch as not everyone would have call for it, but I'd like to mention one essential to *me* that some of you might enjoy. It's a photo app introduced to me by a photographer friend of mine, and used extensively during our recent trip through Zion, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly. Its name is, appropriately, AutoStitch. What it does is, take individual shots, then, as one sweeps and takes more individual shots, and finally indicates "complete", uses pattern recognition to "stitch" the shots together into a grand panorama. This may then be saved and edited (for me, simply, cropped to rectangular shape). Superb.

No mention of Aldiko? It has a access to a number of independent ebook stores, a large catalog of free and public domain ebooks and, is a third the size of the Kindle app. It also supports the epub book format.

Another good third-party ebook app for Android is Moon+ Reader, which can read both epub and mobi files (something Aldiko can't do), as well as browse OPDS book databases (such as the one exported by the Calibre program on your desktop computer).

Also, the more adventurous Android users can download the Android 4.2 camera app, which includes both a panorama mode and the new Photo Sphere 360° camera mode.

I feel like a old fuddy duddy, but the only one of these categories I have any interest in is the one to find food (and more importantly good beer). Thanks for the heads up about the brewery finder maps. That should come in handy once I finally join the masses with a "mainstream" smartphone.

I'm definitely looking more forward to the productivity/work side of things. Would love to get suggestions on business travel apps like TripIt or Expensify, along with suggestions for better email clients, note taking apps, etc...

I use ACV (A Comic Viewer) for comics, mostly manga though, and Alkido for e-books. I'm willing to try alternates though. How about video players for stored content? Using Moboplayer atm, anything better? No mention for Pulse as a news aggregator, or is that too specialized for mention under "The Web"?

Only problem with Photosynth is that it takes a fish-eyed panorama. It's cool but not what I'd consider a normal panorama shot. My old WM6 HTC phone had a real panorama mode and it worked really well. Samsung has a good WP app for their phones called Photo Studio that has some good editing and panorama modes. Also, there's an app called Photogram for those who want Instagram style effects. It's actually pretty slick.

I can personally say the Plume, Foursquare and GetGlue are all pretty nice. Plume, even the free version, is by far the best Twitter client I found for Android, and I tried a ton. Love all the extra settings and tweaks and even the widget is nice if you don't want to open the full app.

I've never used twitter, and seeing the examples in the pictures here I can at least see that it's completely pointless so I don't have to worry about it. Good to know.

The other app suggestions were good though. Considering how crap phone pictures are I don't quite see the point of so many photo apps, but whatever.

edit: slight niggle that "organic and local" isn't really healthier food, those are just marketing terms, and philosophically different, not nutritionally (yes, had been tested). Organic butter will make you as fat. For a science site I think that's a valid point.

Android's stock camera in ICS+ can do native pan and sweep panoramas, and JB 4.2+ can do native photo spheres which are superior in capabilities to share and edit when compared to the aftermarket 360 degree panorama apps...

Your suggestion for an ebook reader amounts to "Kindle can be used for amazon's large catalogue."

It can't be a surprise that your readers would like to know things like:What ebook readers can be used with multiple formats? Can any ebook reader read books bought from other retailers? Which ebook readers play nicely (or play best) with Project Gutenberg titles? At least you chose to mention pdf capabilities.Which e reader app is closest to the (I believe) discontinued Stanza?edit for typo.

Android's stock camera in ICS+ can do native pan and sweep panoramas, and JB 4.2+ can do native photo spheres which are superior in capabilities to share and edit when compared to the aftermarket 360 degree panorama apps...

Also, tiny planet mode in android 4.2+ is great.

This is a good point, but unfortunately only Google is shipping stock Android in any significant numbers. Samsung et al seem to develop a slightly different camera app for every handset they ship, and it doesn't always include every feature. For this reason, I tried to think of solutions that would apply to most Android, if not all, Android users.

I sure wish everyone would stop legitimizing yelp so much by recommending it. I just don't think that companies with unethical business models should be rewarded in the marketplace.

Seconded. Yelp has a history of abusing its power to lean on businesses to improve their rankings. The problem isn't a one time issue but a chronic problem.

Any good suggestions for alternatives with a comparable number of user reviews for local spots? I'm not a big fan of Yelp, but end up using it on the computer, because it seems it is the only site that shows up for certain types of searches.

I rely on Zinio for my magazines. It's a great app, with its only obvious failing being that every time you open run the app it takes you to the list of magazines rather than to what you were reading last.

Before buying my Surface RT tablet, I checked with Zinio that they had an app on the Windows Store. Having bought the tablet, I found that the app is at present not available in Australia - so I have to hold onto my Android tablet until it arrives:(.

Rather than list a bunch of headlines from RSS feeds on a page, Currents taps into your Google Reader subscriptions and lays them out in tile format by favicon.

Thanks for mentioning that! I somehow managed to miss the Google Reader tie-in previously, and had lamented the lack of a canned/preset Ars Technica reading option in Currents. I just dug around for it, found it (is that new?), and have added Ars, currently the only thing I have in Reader. Will see how it goes.

One important (to me) caveat with Currents: clicking in-article links, such as "read the full site/article" stuff, opens the linked content in a sort of embedded "Currents browser" rather than in Chrome or whatever your default browser may be. (Maybe it's a skinned version of the Android browser? Chrome? No idea.) It does NOT support zoom and the like, so it is usually quite useless to me, with my tired old eyes. It does have an icon to launch the page in your browser, but it's an extra step. Currents might be a great alternative otherwise, as I sort of dislike Reader. As it is, I have Currents limited to three or four sites that render well, for the most part, in the Currents interface, as limited as it is.[/quote]

Edit: Google Currents does work with the Ars Technica RSS feed, but there are some gotchas. Thought I'd come back and add some "tips." Free! Boring, though, and useless to anyone not interested, so I'll put this in spoiler tags.

Spoiler: show

First, if you're a premium subscriber, the full text RSS feed won't work too well in Currents. It will never manage to generate that feed's "front page layout," where the listing of individual articles would normally start. That page will be mostly blank, with a message about "we're doin' it, man - when you refresh Currents, it'll be here!" That's bogus, it will not work. You can only read full articles, one at a time, by swiping through all pages of each, in succession. So don't go there.

The standard, non-premium, "all articles" RSS feed works, though. The result looks nice and works well, within Currents. Well, until you click a link in one of the articles, to include clicking-through to finish reading an article or to the comments here. Then you're back to that funky-assed, Currents-branded browser that I mentioned previously, whatever the hell it is. Using that browser will take you to the full version of the site, not the mobile version. (Ars might want to see if they can sniff that User-Agent and treat it as a mobile client by default, unless/until the user opts for the full site.) You can, however, scroll down and click the "VIEW MOBILE SITE" link. You can also log in, and it seems to save that info in cookies, like a normal browser. But it's still a funky-assed browser, and so may not be worth the effort for some users. Just sayin'. I have no idea how long it retains session cookies and so on, but it does at least work.

Currents with Ars Technica Summary: I like having the alternative, and the layout is really quite nice! But that browser, whatever the hell it is, kills the deal.

Florence Ion / Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.